May 18, 2006 - In his doctorial thesis social historian William Cecil Headrick called the American Dream “a fiction stronger than truth.” He was writing in 1941 while Europe and Asia were buffeted by the winds of war – a storm which would soon engulf America and irretrievably alter the country. Headrick described the concept of an American Dream as the proposition that on this continent people were freed from old world ideas of status and class. In America an immigrant could by seizing opportunity and applying industry create for his children and their children an improved economic and social standing impossible in the world that the immigrant had left behind. It was Headrick’s thesis that American reality had failed to live up to the dream; that social and economic class was as rigidly defined in America as it had been in Old World societies.

We still give lip service to the fiction of the American Dream; that in this nation of immigrants a person is free to rise above his origins and by hard work and perseverance provide his children with a life that will transcend that to which the parents were born. We have trumpeted the myth of an open society in a land of opportunity from the earliest days of European settlement whenever the powerful needed to attract people to populate the wilderness and perform the work needed to be done.

In each generation and each era of development the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of immigrants have decried the next wave of immigrants for endangering the tenuous grip on social and economic status. English Quakers wrung their hands in consternation when Penn first promoted immigration from Wales and then the pietistic sects of the Rhineland. Know Nothings and Boston Brahmins railed at the Irish coming to displace honest Protestant wage earners. The sons and grandsons of northern European immigrants entered the Twentieth Century seeking to exclude or limit immigrants from the huddled masses of lesser races from southern and eastern Europe – Italians, Poles, and Jews who came to man America’s emerging industrial economy.

The arguments they made then echo today in the rhetorical polemics against immigrants – legal and illegal – who come from the south to take “American jobs from American workers” in pursuit of the myth of the American Dream. Yet it is the same people with social, economic, and political power who promise the American Dream to attract and exploit the underground economy manned by undocumented workers and seek to preserve political power by enacting more stringent and draconian laws to keep the dreamers in their place. At the same time they advocate “guest worker” programs to insure a steady supply of exploitable labor to drive down the wage expectations of the descendants of earlier exploited immigrants.

The message that they wish to send is this: If you believe in an American Dream you will soon wake from your sleep to confront the reality of economic and social class in America and the government in the guise of securing the Homeland is laboring mightily to keep laborers in their exploitable place. Only when yesterday’s immigrants embrace the interests of tomorrow’s immigrants and demand that they too are entitled to a living wage, decent housing and quality health care in exchange for their contributions to America will the America Dream acquire the substance of which America dreams.